Podcast S01E15 ~ Chapter 13 Up Now!

Chapter 13: Beast With A Human Face

…in which Fairwood finds a clue and Ricky has a confession…

He was off his game and he knew it.

He unrolled his toolkit, selected a sharp, curved blade, and prepared to get to work.

Some of his cousins liked to strip off when they had a job like this to do, standing amid plastic sheeting partially or fully erect, getting off on the blood or the pain or the noises. He viewed the meat they served up at family gatherings with mild suspicion and distaste: it always tasted better when you knew the butcher hadn’t fucked it first or wanked himself off during the process.

Ricky was naked, the way he usually slept, but this was a job to him, and nothing stirred beyond the occasional growl in his stomach.

~ C. M. Rosens, The Crows, p, 266

Yes, that’s a What We Do In The Shadows reference, which remains the funniest line in the whole film. This is also a fairly important moment that reinforces Ricky’s aceness, which I thought was important to stress given that he’s about to torture someone to death.

There’s no sexual drive behind the killing, no urge to kill to satisfy something like that, he’s literally just doing it because that’s what he does.

Ricky’s aceness was commented on in a lecture Be Gay Do Crimes: Queer Gothic Reimaginings given by Dr Sam Hirst for the Romancing the Gothic lecture series: removing the sexual element of serial killing and also of his and Carrie’s relationship ‘removes the impulse to purpose’ and centres other elements instead, so the emphasis is shifted off sex – sexual desire, sexual attraction, sexual threat – and onto questions around grey/a-morality, what friendship could look like in this context of trauma, abuse and monstrosity, and what being human is all about.

If you want to see the full lecture, you can find that here: The Crows is used as an example at 1:41:11.